The first anniversary post

Lady Bracknell is astonished to report that she has now been contributing to the blogosphere for exactly twelve months.

It seems like only yesterday that Young Master Marmite finally prevailed upon her ladyship to take up her virtual quill pen and share her perorations with any cyberspace-enabled persons who might happen upon them. When one reaches Lady Bracknell's advanced age, one is regularly astonished at how quickly a year can pass: this may be why it always seems to be Christmas. And there is a depressing thought.

It may be the case that persons such as Lady Bracknell, who experience significant physical enfeeblement of a type which requires hours of bed rest almost every day, and in whose lives of necessity, therefore, little of any dramatic import happens, experience the passing of time rather differently than do their physically vigorous peers who dash frantically from one social gathering to another. Not having any ties to the educational calendar, for instance, Lady Bracknell is often hard pressed to remember what month it is.

Major annual events have a tendency to creep up on Lady Bracknell and catch her unawares, only impeding on her consciousness when some innocent soul asks a question such as, "And what are you doing for Easter?". Were Lady Bracknell sufficiently robust to "do something" for Easter, her life would be so different from what it is at present that she would struggle to recognise it as her own.

Individual days which - by the unavoidable necessity for enforced inactivity - are rendered lengthy and burdensome, blend into weeks and months which fly past at an almost dizzying speed. Nevertheless, although Lady Bracknell is sometimes wistful when her impairments prevent her from doing something which others do easily and without conscious thought, she would not wish to be one of those persons who appear to avoid every opportunity for quiet contemplation by rushing hither and yon from dawn to dusk. There is, after all, much to be said both for quiet contemplation and for the opportunity to read widely and voraciously. When one must lie down, one need experience no guilt when one consumes novels whole in a single reading.

Lady Bracknell suspects that persons who live their lives at a frenetic pace cannot have the opportunity to think deeply about what they are doing or to form reasoned opinions on matters of importance to them. We are often told that we are, daily and hourly, bombarded with more information than we have ever previously been subjected to: must these "soundbytes" not rattle in a distracting manner around the skulls of persons who have not the time to mentally digest them?

One remedy, she assumes, would be to create internal barriers so that none of the information seeps through. But Lady Bracknell's own upbringing and education would prevent her from considering this to be an acceptable solution leading, as it surely must, to extremes of solipsism. As John Donne said, "No man is an island". To ignore this truth is to live a life of entirely selfish pursuits, and Lady Bracknell is confident that she need not enumerate to her readers the multiple examples she witnesses daily of the behaviour of persons who never, for one moment, consider the feelings of others.

Lady Bracknell feels that the logical flow of this her first anniversary blog post has somehow got away from her. In short, the point she was attempting to make was that physical limitations can have unforeseen advantages. And that the trick to living cheerfully with one's impairments lies in developing the skill to recognise and appreciate those advantages.

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Lady Bracknell has, in the main, enjoyed the experience of blogging over the last year. She hopes to continue to grace the information superhighway with her firmly-held opinions for quite some time to come.